


But It Don't Really Happen That Way At All

by pedalpusher



Series: The Day I Can Control Myself [1]
Category: Music RPF, Rock Music RPF, The Who (Band)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Who-Typical General Insanity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 08:18:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18069863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pedalpusher/pseuds/pedalpusher
Summary: Historically, it has been easier for them to simply hit one another.(Or: what happens in Tanglewood stays in Tanglewood.)





	But It Don't Really Happen That Way At All

_Lenox, Massachusetts_

_July 7-8, 1970_

The Who amble off the stage in a crooked march, swaying in the heat and the buzz of white lights and still-humming amplifiers. To Roger’s eyes, his sight blurred by sweat, the crowd is a dull and roaring mass; a singular, breathing thing in the balmy evening haze. Keith leads the charge with a cheery drumstick salute, and Roger and Pete follow, with John as their trailing caboose.

As they depart, Pete hooks a companionable arm around Roger’s neck. It’s confirmation the night has transpired well, that Pete is in good spirits and the brandy backstage will go down sweet instead of sour. They’ll unwind with the other bands and the crew and the girls until it’s time to drive the short few kilometers back into town, to civilization and hotel rooms with crisp white sheets, off the verdant fairytale escape that is the Tanglewood venue. It’s barely midnight, and these American summers have a way of stretching time into putty. Even the longest nights seem young yet. The rising sun often startles them all.

They’ve been here before, not even a full year ago, in the days leading up to the muck and misery of Woodstock. Roger likes it here far better—the Berkshires, they call it, which is funny because he and Heather have a little cottage in Berkshire back home, and it isn’t much different, this patch of countryside—and he imagines the band does, too. As the rest of them file into backstage hallways, gradually clotting with people, filtering to and from rooms stacked with beer and lukewarm sandwiches, Roger frees himself from the inside of Pete’s elbow and ventures out a side door into the night.

He makes it a few paces in his suede boots before the sensation of grass under his bare feet beckons irresistibly to him. In this part of the country, the warmer months bring fireflies that blink on and off in a symphony of tiny lights. He takes the opportunity to admire them, to remove his shoes and have a smoke with the din of his companions in the building behind him, the sound of speech all blunted and soft like the vision of the crowd with its boundaries erased. The edges of everything sanded away by noise and sweat.

They’ve been getting along well as of late, he and Pete, which for them means a carefully channeled tension as opposed to the spontaneously combustible variety. Things have not always been so good during their visits to this side of the pond, and the press is delighted to construct the story of a band one poorly timed sneeze away from another punch-up. The truth is that the relationship between the two of them is more complicated than a pair of dueling egos, and while Roger is sure that element doesn’t help, there’s been a longstanding simmer of an altogether different character; it emerges as much in the friendly crook of an arm as the end of a fist.

Neither of them speaks about it, have ever spoken about it. Roger would rather drown in a puddle of upstate New York mud than admit the flying sparks are anything but anger and the natural byproduct of a well-oiled machine. Pete, he assumes, is indulging him that. No one is convinced their high-strung, art school drop-out of a guitarist treads an entirely straight line, and Roger occasionally envies him for it. Pete has the luxury of embracing the caricature, and Roger thinks he runs full-tilt with the joke as a means of self-defense. Like play-flirting with Mick Jagger and Ronnie Lane after a few rounds might maintain the veil of deniability.

Historically, it has been easier for them to simply hit one another. When Pete gets drunk and turns his affections to Roger, it’s like he’s fighting dirty. It’s a fight Pete knows he can win.

Roger stomps his cigarette out on the lawn and slips his boots back on. When he slinks back inside, the crowd has thinned a bit, to his relief. He proceeds down the hall, poking his head in and out of dressing and side rooms, until in so doing he is greeted by a cheer from Pete, glass of brandy raised ceremoniously in one hand.

“Ah, there he is! The man of the hour! Gone to commune with nature, and now, suitably restored, he returns to grace us with his presence.”

Roger huffs a laugh. “How’s that brandy restoring you?”

“Mightily.” Pete resumes scavenging bits of picked-over food from a folding table, its cheap plastic cover askew. “As are the refreshments. God bless America, it’s a cornucopia.”

“Where’s John? Keith?”

“Gone with the only pair of good-looking birds, I reckon. Bastards left none for us. It’s either them or Ian and the boys have absconded with all the girls.”

Pete slumps down on the nearest couch in a mock display of defeat, his limbs nearly too long to be contained by it. Roger shoulders past a group of crewmembers and some more faces he doesn’t recognize, plucking a beer from a bucket of tepid water that maybe once contained ice for all of twenty minutes.

“Well, two geezers like us? There’s no competing with them, is there.” Roger drops down next to him, careful to modulate the distance between them just so. “Deck’s right stacked.”

Pete narrows his eyes. “Are you saying it’s you and me against Keith and John, or you and me against Jethro Tull?”

Roger cracks a smile. “Dare I imply that you and I aren’t the most dashing members of The Who?”

“Good man,” Pete assents, and clinks their drinks together before each of them takes a pull. Mid-swig, he sputters and begins to laugh. “Christ, what a load of horse shit. Well, _you_ , maybe. You’ve got the whole… chiseled rock ‘n’ roll Adonis thing going for you.”

Roger offers him a good-natured eyeroll, knocking a knee against his. “And you’ve got your winning personality.”

“Cheers.” Pete grins, an expression that always seems to read more manic on him than totally pleasant. “That makes one of us.”

They recline there for several moments with the humid air pulsing around them, nursing watery beer and expensive brandy, digesting the little bits of conversation that flit in and out of earshot. Roger feels closer to Pete than he had intended when he sat down, like there had been some miscalculation. He raps the back of his fingernails against the beer bottle.

“What made you decide we’d do Tommy?” he asks. “I thought you were sick of it.”

Pete leans in a bit closer, drily confessional. “Aren’t we all. And yet the atmosphere called for one last hurrah, wouldn’t you agree?”

Roger raises his eyebrows. “You thought Tull were going to show us up.”

“You heard the crowd! Hollering all the way out in the nosebleeds. Ain’t about to follow up with a set that’s fifty percent untested, unreleased—”

“We’ve done it before, Pete.”

“With Tommy, I know.” He leans back, raking an oversized hand through his hair with a gusty exhale. “Tommy was different. It _is_ different. I knew it was, in my gut, like all we had to do was let it fly and by the end the entire room would understand it, what it meant. The whole world would understand.”

He’s nervous, Roger realizes. Not yet convinced that the threads of new material will weave together into a proper tapestry that might hold its own in Tommy’s overwhelming shadow. They’ve wrapped the U.S. leg of the tour, and their three-week reprieve before the next round back home brings the future into stark focus: they can’t tour on Tommy forever, and they need a new record. That obligation, as ever, falls exclusively on Pete’s spindly shoulders.

The only fate more terrifying than carrying on with a failed album, Roger knows, is trying to replicate a hit one. He’s not insensitive to that. For all their differences, he’s not once wavered in championing Pete’s songwriting. The man can be pretentious, condescending, and downright mean-spirited, but he’s got the genius to back it up; always has. That was half the trouble with him.

“I think it’s brilliant,” Roger says, with an unintentional gentleness that he kicks himself for. “Everything you’ve done. What you will do, whatever it is. I’ve never doubted you, you know that. None of us have.”

Pete’s eyes flash with bitter cold, that fickle tendency of his to turn and scowl on a dime. Then, as quickly as it comes, it fades away again.

“You’ve always trusted me, haven’t you?” He asks this as though it were a pity, but his voice is warm. He sounds resigned, conciliatory.

Roger swallows. “’Course I have.”

“I think you’re daft.”

“Wouldn’t be the first.”

This exchange is a fraction too raw, too sincere, even for backstage confines lubricated by shreds of adrenaline and copious amounts of alcohol. Roger is relieved when Pete swings his paw back around with the brandy glass, and sees the string-bite wounds on his knuckles have re-opened in bright spots of blood. The white of his boiler suit is stained with old smears, concentrated where the hand hits the thigh.

“You’re bleeding again,” Roger says.

Pete angles his wrist to observe. “Indeed I am. Occupational hazard.”

“Come on, can’t have you ruining the upholstery.”

“I’m positively certain that far worse has spilled on this couch, Rog’, than a few drops of blood—”

“Right, well, we’re not going to think about that, or at least I’m not.” He stands, taking Pete by the elbow, and Pete, for his protestations, seems entirely content to be dragged away provided the glass of brandy can come with him. “There’s a washroom down the hall. I’m sure we can scrounge up a bandage.”

He leads them both to a lavatory with sickly yellow tiles and too-bright fluorescent lighting, but there’s a proper sink with a cabinet above it, adjacent to a somewhat dilapidated stall. It’s like a scene out of a horror film, but promising enough. He pulls a sheepish Pete in with him, who is furtively sucking at the blood on his fingers, thinking Roger hasn’t noticed. Roger sets his beer on the sink and pulls open the mirrored cabinet door. There’s toilet paper, a soda can, faded bottles of prehistoric toilet cleaner, and a tin labeled First Aid.

“Bob’s your uncle,” he says.

There’s a click and the rattling of metal behind him, and he turns to see that Pete has closed and latched the door, is leaned up against it, sipping at his brandy with his face obscured by the glass. A bolt races up Roger’s spine. He turns quickly back to the tin, rummaging through its contents with a distant and panicky sort of thrill.

“Expired paracetamol… tweezers. Laxatives. Rubber gloves—”

Pete knocks his head against the door and laughs maniacally.

“—cotton balls, and tape.” He sighs, replacing the first aid kit on its perch in the sorry little cabinet. “Americans. More food than you’ve ever seen in your life, and not a single contingency plan for when it all goes pear-shaped.”

“Priorities, mate. Imagine if you’d never been bombed to hell and back.”

Roger has crystalline memories of a snarling stomach and loaves of bread bulked up with chalk. It’s very nearly perverse, this level of excess, alcohol and women and plates filled to overflowing. He thinks maybe it’s gotten to him, that he can blame deviant temptation on the simple fact of overabundance, that desire naturally claws at whatever it considers just out of reach.

One can ration lust as skillfully as hunger, with patience and practice. Roger has got patience in spades. He grabs Pete again, shepherding him to the sink, positioning his injured hand over the basin.

“Hey,” Pete mumbles, not really meaning it. Roger plucks the glass of brandy from his hand, pours a splash over the cuts, and follows it up with a blast of cold water from the tap.

“Ow,” says Pete, more as an observation than a complaint.

“We’re thinking on our feet, here. Alcohol is alcohol, yeah?”

“Speak for yourself! That’s good brandy, it is. What’s with you, you and and your insatiable urge to flush perfectly serviceable intoxicants down drains.”

“Never going to live that one down, am I.” Suddenly inspired, Roger bolts down what’s left in the glass. It’s more than he expected. Pete’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t protest. If anything, he seems smugly satisfied.

“Roger! I’m impressed. A problem-solver and a lush.”

“Hold still. Finishing touches.” He sets the glass down, and in a quick, precise tug on the fabric of his shirt, removes a strip of cotton fringe that leaves the skin above his hip exposed. He’ll repair it himself, when they’re back on the bus to the airport, trying not to think about the circumstances that precipitated the tear.

Pete is quiet, alarmingly so, while Roger wraps his two most battered fingers together and ties a gentle knot just under the knuckles.

Roger exhales and shuts the cabinet door. They look at each other through the mirror.

“It’s a bust,” Pete says. “No birds, no bandages. Just beer. And brandy.”

“And blood,” Roger notes. His own fingers are stained red.

“And blood,” Pete agrees. He slips his arm around Roger’s shoulder. Back here, again. Roger stares at Pete’s reflection, his head swimming, and prays it’s the unforeseen quantity of brandy.

“There’s always been a place for you, you know,” says Pete, that dark, dangerous glint in his eye. There isn’t, really, but Roger knows what he means, knows the offer that’s being extended in Pete’s roundabout way; that it is a lapse in judgment as much as it is and always has been implicitly conditional, subject to the man’s own whims and wants and profound insecurities. He’s drunk, now, so it’s easy for him to let the simmering boil over, to make gestures and suggestions that he could conveniently revoke if Roger called him on it.

Roger is almost angry, incredulous. “We’re doing this here? Right now? You want to talk about your hang-ups in the fucking toilet? Proposition me?”

Pete feigns offense. “They’re your hang-ups, too. And you can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”

“Sure,” Roger concedes, weakly, to his own surprise. He wants to smash his head against the mirror, stop looking at the both of them.

“We can’t keep doing this forever,” Pete warns him.

“Yes we can,” Roger insists.

“Something’s going to give. Has to.”

“It won’t be me.”

Pete seizes him by the shoulders, turning them toward each other and leaning in to stare him down, like he’s inspecting him for a weakness he can exploit. Roger maintains a determined poker face.

It’s ironic, and terribly frustrating, that in a group defined by its permanent state of catharsis, musical and otherwise, they should be expected to stop here. It’s also for the best. He loves Pete, as a friend and in this awful, hot-blooded way he doesn’t fully understand, but for the sake of the band Roger intends to carry on stomping at the latter until it withers and dies. Pete’s got his contingency plan, he’s got his money and education and another road out of a life languishing in Shepherd’s Bush if it all blows to pieces—as it has often threatened. He can risk the come-ons and the provocations and the inevitable fallout, demented indulgences that are doomed to turn ugly.

All Roger’s got is The Who, and he believes in them with a pure and unflappable faith that he channels into desperate resolve when Pete moves his hands to cup Roger’s face.

They remain like this for long and agonizing seconds, Roger with his jaw firmly set, Pete’s ghostly blue eyes piercing into his soul, until the tension spontaneously cracks with a quirk in Pete’s lip, a twitch that grows into a sly smile.

“Oh, fuck off,” Roger groans, and Pete wraps him into a bear hug, plastering his face into the boiler suit. Pete smells like sweat and that indescribable static perfume that comes from being under stage lights for hours. It’s not unpleasant.

“You love me anyway,” Pete declares, and Roger lets him have it because it’s true, and because it lets Pete feel like he’s won. In a way, he always does. He sways them back and forth, his chin in Roger’s mane of hair.

“Right. You’re mad,” Roger says into Pete’s shoulder, but embraces him back. The relief of this is so great it nearly brings tears to his eyes.

They are interrupted by a cacophony at the door, an unmistakable flurry of knocks that organizes itself into a chaotic but discernible rhythm.

Pete rolls his eyes theatrically and peels himself off Roger, who sighs and scrubs a hand down his face. The knocks continue, reaching a deafening crescendo.

Keith bellows into the door over the ruckus. “Come on then, off the pot! Everybody out! It’s an emergency, they’re evacuating the premises. Some miserable sod called in a bomb threat.”

“And who shall we thank for that, I wonder?” calls Pete. The knocks abruptly stop.

“Pete! It’s you! I been looking for you. For Christ’s sake, a man needs to piss in this lifetime.”

“Bugger off,” Pete suggests cheerfully. “I’m being tended to.” Roger punches him in the shoulder, not too hard, but Pete buckles and makes like he’s been mortally wounded.

“Why didn’t you say so, old chap. I went ahead and brought the battering ram.” Now even Roger’s cracking, balling a fist up to his mouth to prevent laughing aloud. “Make way!”

Pete, in a burst of genuine alarm, rushes to unlatch the door before Keith can orchestrate whatever destructive plan he has in mind. The drummer barrels on through, knocking Pete into Roger and Roger straight back into the sink. They fall over one another, leaned up against the porcelain and glass in an awkward arrangement of limbs. Pete winks at Roger underneath him, as Keith wanders obliviously to the toilet stall to relieve himself, trailing watery footprints darkened with mud.

“Evening, Rog’,” greets Keith, as though Roger’s presence in the washroom were self-evident and wholly unremarkable.

“Why in god’s name are you soaking wet?” asks Roger, untangling himself from Pete, though he’s not sure he wants to know the answer to that.

“He’s got a bloody canoe,” says Pete, leaning out into the hallway to survey the damage. “I suppose that was the battering ram.”

“I always come prepared,” assures Keith.

Roger feels like this is the least of their concerns. “Keith, you called in a bomb threat?”

“Fear not,” announces John in his soft-spoken deadpan, materializing in the doorway like a peculiarly flamboyant apparition. He’s perfectly dry in his dark sequined jacket and fire-red bellbottom trousers, brushing past Pete to join them all in the washroom, stepping gingerly over puddles to preserve the costume and his dignity. “He’s full of shit. He did capsize in the lily pond, though. Serves him right for raiding the boathouse, I told him. Begged me to come save his sorry arse ‘till he realized the water was up to his waist.”

Keith ignores him, coated thoroughly in pond grime, whistling loudly to himself as he zips his fly and flushes the toilet with a rather vengeful kick of his boot. It sounds to Roger like “Tommy Can You Hear Me.”

John withdraws a cigarette case from the inside of his jacket, fetching one of his own and then offering another to each of them. They light up like a quartet of miscreant teenagers, sneaking off for a fag in the boy’s room, one of them comically drenched and stinking of standing water.

“Good show, gentlemen, good show,” says Keith, clapping both John and Roger forcefully on the back with the cigarette dangling from his lip. Roger coughs out a lungful of smoke and laughs despite himself. It’s true, after all. They do know how to go out with a bang.

Four bastards who never should have been in a band together; that’s what Pete calls them. Somehow there’s a camaraderie in that regardless, in the lot of them mixing together like oil and water. More like fire and petrol, Roger muses, with the way they’re prone to combust onstage and off. Yet they need each other. Every single one of them, indispensable, the keystones to a structure that collapses with any one element removed.

The Who have devised the miraculous engine that runs off unrefined chaos as its fuel source. Night after night they set it all ablaze with joyous sound and fury, an explosion that reduces themselves and the audience to ash, only to piece themselves together and start again. It can’t possibly be sustainable, and yet it propels them onward, spurs each one of them to be better. It’s what makes them great. They’re the world’s first rock ‘n’ roll band to defy the laws of physics.

They’ll be legends. Roger is certain of it, feels it in his heart like the feels the magic of the four of them together when they’re up there on stage like an electric hurricane.

They’ll be all right, too. He meets Pete’s eyes for a fleeting glance, Pete with his twisted, knowing smile. There’s a softness to it now, an understanding that has passed between them. It still hurts, but he’ll survive. It’s the kind of hurt that reminds him it’s all worth it in the end.

“Well then,” says Pete, flicking ash off his cigarette thoughtfully, and looking pointedly at Keith. “Who wants to go boating?”

There’s a beat, and Keith, never one to miss his cue, vaults himself back out of the smoke-filled washroom to pile himself into the waterlogged canoe.

“All aboard, Captain Townshend!” he crows, fist in the air. “At your ready!”

“Anchors aweigh!” Pete obliges. He gallops out behind the canoe, bends down with his hands at the stern, and proceeds to push the grimy thing with Keith in it back down the Tanglewood hallway, to a chorus of screaming and scrambling from unsuspecting bystanders.

John and Roger gather at the washroom doorway to watch bedlam unfold.

“Ever find yourself wondering if we’re in over our heads?” John asks mildly.

“Every day of my life,” Roger tells him. “And I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title courtesy of "Naked Eye," one of the most fantastic Townshend compositions ever written.
> 
> This is a rapid-fire, unbetaed work, courtesy of many hours of research and weekends spent watching concert footage, theorizing on a Pete/Roger scenario that could slot believably into the band's history. I have no knowledge of any Keith shenanigans that may have occurred that beautiful summer evening in Massachusetts, but there's a pond on site, and canoe-theft seemed eminently reasonable. Cheers, and thanks for reading!


End file.
